French Will

4. Three out of four children in the UK spend less time outside than prisoners. (via @lucyjones)

Actually it’s better to look at unit economics as total spending in past few years has included a lot of dev cost. Actual cost/yr to maintain current rate of interception incl depreciation is <10m. Long term I think we can get to ~2m/yr per percentage point of emissions cut. We already achieve this in our best deployment.

People in the west have no idea how rich they are If you earn >125 dollars per day you're part of the 1%

When you're angry at "the 1%" and discover you're actually one of them

“But surgeon, why bother removing the bullet from my body if it still exists after you’ve put it in the bin?”

One underappreciated fact about the ocean plastic problem is that plastic pollution is persistent in some places but not in others. For most of the world's oceans, plastic only persists for a few weeks or months before ending up back on land. In our models, we see that 80% leaves the ocean again within a month and 97% within a year. What this means is that, when we reduce the amount of plastic flowing into the ocean, we should see an almost immediate reduction in the amount of plastic in the ocean. It also means that most plastic pollution you see is hyper-local. Unlike something like CO₂, countries and cities therefore have a "selfish" incentive to curb their plastic emissions. For example, want to eliminate plastic pollution in Bali's waters and coastlines? Then stop plastic from leaking from Bali's towns and cities! Another consequence is that, for most of the world's oceans, there is no need to sweep the ocean surface; it cleanses itself once we stop putting new waste in. The exception to this is the ocean garbage patches, where currents trap the plastic and keep the trash away from coastlines, preventing it from washing up. This is why The Ocean Cleanup employs a two-pronged approach: intercepting plastic in rivers to stop inflow and cleaning up the legacy pollution in the ocean garbage patches.

During the first 8 years of The Ocean Cleanup, we collected 314,000 kg of trash. We're now collecting the same amount... every 4.5 days.